Hide and Seek
by Justina C. Nathans
Summary: Sometimes the noises you hear in the middle of the night are not the sounds of monsters, but the sounds of men. Gil/Alice & Oz


**Title:** Hide and Seek  
**Series:** Pandora Hearts  
**Author**: me  
**Rating:** R/NC-17  
**Word Count:** 2,673  
**Pairing:** Gil/Alice + Oz  
**Warnings:** Sexual situations, implied sexual situations, and a little bit of skeeviness  
**Summary:** Sometimes the noises you hear in the middle of the night are not the sounds of monsters, but the sounds of men. (Originally written for the Pandora Hearts kink meme on LJ.)

"One of life's primal situations; the game of **hide and seek**. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself."

* * *

It's been going on for weeks now.

Oz doesn't remember the first time very clearly, especially with grogginess of a large wound that cuts him from collar to hip bone, but he knows that he remembers yelling, their voices raised in a room right down the hall, and that he wondered while half-asleep if he should try to break up the fight. He drifts off that time with the question on his lips and wakes up to find some hours later that they're back, no worse for wear, even though Alice refuses to look at him in the eye for very long and Gil seems to be overly calm, relaxed, but quiet.

He had assumed then that it was just a fluke, whatever had happened, and that a fight of that magnitude (or what he assumed was a fight) wouldn't happen again.

But then he started noticing that those same tell-tale signs were appearing more and more frequently, found that he heard Alice's light footsteps moving down the hall at night, once a night, _every_ night, in fact, past his room, the knock at a door, and the answering creak as it swings closed. He never hears anything after that, more often than not finds that he drifts asleep waiting for some other noise to clue him in as to what's happening, and wakes up the next morning wondering how he could have slept through it all.

One night, the mystery gets to him.

He stares up at the ceiling, in bed, and does not move, barely dares to breathe in case he might miss something, and waits for the sound that he has become all too accustomed to hearing.

A door opens down the hall.

There.

He waits until he hears Alice's footsteps move past his room (and her feet block out the dim light of the hall for just a split second) before he moves towards the door, opens it enough to stick his head out, and waits.

A door at the end of the hallway creaks open, then creaks shut seconds later, long enough for someone to answer...

Or for someone to slip inside, he realizes.

He leaves his own bedroom door open and slips into the hallway quietly, watches every shadow as if it is a demon come to life, and tries to listen for Alice's voice, the only clue he has to find where she's gone. Oz makes it twenty or so feet down the hallway, already to the bedroom a few doors down from his, and hears it: "--again today." It's Alice, he'd know her voice anywhere, but she sounds... breathless. Angry. Dark. "This is stupid."

The door he comes upon is unlocked, cracked open just a tiny bit like it never fully closed to begin with, enough where he can press one hand to the doorframe and look just enough inside to see Alice in an oversized shirt (which he doesn't recognize, and it makes him wonder how, exactly, she made it out every night in _that_ without being noticed) with her arms crossed defiantly over her chest.

"Apparently not," he hears from deeper inside the room and it's... it's _Gil's_ voice moving through the room, towards the door. Oz watches him pause a few feet in front of Alice, his own arms crossed over his chest as if to match. "Because you didn't say a word then and you haven't said anything yet."

"To Oz?" He feels his heart squeeze as he realizes exactly what's going on. "Of course not, and I don't plan on it, but it's still stupid."

They're smart, he realizes, as he watches their shadows flicker and move against the wall, in the way that they don't meet in their own rooms. If he hadn't have noticed it, Alice's feet, their strange behavior, he would have never guessed it. It explains a lot, actually, their overly explosive arguments, the calm way that Gil regards him after they return, that funny way that Alice's right eye twitches when she looks at Gil, and above all, it explains that entire night after his injury with all of their strange behavior and refusal to look him in the eye.

It explains _too_ much.

He watches through the doorway as Gil takes a step closer, lifts one hand at a time and removes his gloves, lets them fall like from his fingers like magic, like wind, like a quick-shedding skin and they puddle in the ground off to the side. Naked fingers of one hand--of his sealing hand, Oz notices with a shiver--move so slowly and so carefully that Oz can follow them perfectly in the dim light and distance and they grasp at the long hem of Alice's shirt, just around mid-thigh. "Stop calling it stupid," he says and he sounds irritated already, but not visibly. It throws Oz off for a split second. "You're the one who agreed to this."

"I didn't agree to anything." Oz frowns. Alice isn't slapping Gil's hand away, she isn't jumping on top of him or trying to kick him, she's letting him gather the excess material of her long shirt in his fingers and pull her closer. It's clearly an argument by the forceful tone of their voices, but they aren't throwing themselves at each other just yet and there's no blood; it doesn't make any _sense_. "You're the stupid seaweed head who got mad when I called you a useless servant."

"Then what does that make you?" It takes a few seconds, but Oz blinks away the surprise from his eyes to see that they're only inches apart, staring each other down with cold anger and something much, _much_ darker, and Gil's hand is clutching Alice's thigh-- "You're the one who turned your back on Oz that day."

"I'm the master," and it's a mistake she loves to make, Oz knows that; "I'll do whatever I please!"

Gil's laughing at her, he realizes with a frown, which is something he feels like should never be done; he's laughing at her with a dark intensity that looks out of place when he thinks of his useless servant and Oz can't see where his other hand moves to, but he's sure its somewhere close when he sees Alice's eyes narrow and her breath hitch. "Not when it comes to _my_ master, you won't."

The tension in the air is thick enough to cut with a knife and Oz knows that if he doesn't take a step away from the door and go back to his own room, he's going to put a stop to whatever... _this _is. He moves his hand from the doorframe with a push backwards just in time to hear from the open door, "Anything happens to Oz and you'll be the first one I hurt."

Oz does not fall asleep in his own bed until he hears feet pass by his door, light and naked, and two closing doors echo in the hall.

---

Breathless with curiosity and aching with a desire to see more, to see what happens next, Oz slips out of bed in pursuit of Alice the very next night.

This time, he makes the mistake of not following her closer. She darts through hallways with quick steps and goes far beyond the doorway at the end of the hall that he had seen them in, that he had expected her to stop and duck into. He continues to chase her through dark halls, around corners, and the only reason he knows he's getting closer is because the doors on either side of him are diminishing in number, tapering down to just a few that are locked and useless.

One door at the end of the hallway signals the end of his search and Oz pauses with his hand on the doorknob. What if it wasn't the right door? What if he had already missed her and Alice had ducked into one of the other doorways, not to be seen until the next night?

Oz turns the knob.

The door swings open on surprisingly silent hinges.

It's a library, old and unused with shelves covered with dusty canvas sheets and blotted out windows that only serve to show a mere slice of the moon. How they were ever able to find this place and get inside, Oz is sure he'll never know, but he looks around anyway, hopes he hasn't made a wrong turn, that he's in the right--

A choked, breathy cry breaks the silence.

He's in the right place all right and he moves around a long bookshelf, tries to pinpoint the exact location of Alice's voice in the vast, echoing room, and stops, freezes--

From his vantage point at the end of the bookshelf, he sees Alice first, her bent legs spread wide, her hair loose and unbraided and pooled around her on the floor, and it takes a long look into the darkness, a stare that nearly whites out his vision with concentration, until he realizes that she's sitting in Gil's lap, that the hand over her mouth is not just muffling her cries but that there are fingers--_Gil's fingers!_--moving in and out between her lips.

It makes his eyes cross and lose focus, his mind dizzy with pleasure for a brief moment where he has to grip the dusty wood of the bookshelf to steady himself. He's sure that he hears the murmur of one of them speaking--but whether it's Gil's whispers or Alice's breathy words that he's concealing with his fingertips, he's not sure--and he finds himself inexplicably drawn to that sight, moving forward through the racks as to not be seen.

"You're so useless," he hears as he nears their hiding spot against the racks and he's now perfectly sure that it's Alice speaking, her voice muffled by Gil's fingers. Oz is almost positive that it's just an attempt to goad him on and make him angry, to make him stop whatever he's doing--he's _sure_ of it!--and turn this into a normal argument again, but when he gets close enough to see better in the darkness, he realizes that this is a very different argument than all of the others he's seen.

Gil's face is buried in Alice's shoulder, hidden from him at this angle, but he can still see the fingers of one of his hands in Alice's mouth, and the other... He makes a line with his eyes up the naked expanse of Alice's thigh to her waist and then to where he thinks he sees that hand grasping rhythmically under her too-thin shirt. And Alice--_Alice_! His _Chain_, of all things!--he realizes quickly, is not fighting back against him at all. She taunts and curses at him under her breath, moves her hips in an entrancing motion that has Gil moving to meet her in return and causes Oz to lack the ability to look away, and suckles and snakes her tongue around Gil's fingers like she's taking juices from the bone.

Huddled with his own hand over his mouth, Oz doesn't move, not with what's happening in front of him and with the white-hot pleasure running down his his spine in shivers. He remains that way--listens to soft sound of wet flesh on wet flesh, the tiny hitches in Alice's breathing, listens to Gil's muffled curses against Alice's throat, her cheek, her swollen-red mouth when she turns to meet him--until he hears those breathy sobs change to sharp, smothered moans, and Alice cries out behind the hand that smothers her voice, seized up like a archer's bow, and Gil moves his hands to bruise finger marks into her hipbones before freezing up, almost suspended in time.

Oz races back to his room with shaking knees, a smoldering curiosity, and an unquenchable fire in his belly that he can't satiate, even with curled fingers and a slick palm in the privacy of his own bed. He sprawls out on his bed, sticky, spent, panting, and immediately knows _exactly _what to do next.

---

He decides to put his plan into action on the third night.

It's easy to find out where the meeting place is when you know what to listen for and Oz takes full advantage of this newfound knowledge--_I hate dust; somewhere cleaner, then; whatever, as long as there aren't any stupid __books--_by putting the pieces together throughout the day. Eventually he gets the whole picture by the time they've finished dinner, not in the library, not in that first abandoned room, but in Gil's _bedroom_ (which is enough to set off a devious smirk that scares most everyone around him and even makes Alice wonder what he's up to).

Oz waits in his room until it is late, until he hears Alice move towards the bath and stay there for nearly an hour, and until the halls become quiet in preparation for bed. He doesn't even have to sneak into Gil's bedroom, a thought that delights him in much the same way that unleashing a cat attack would, and its the first time he's ever been so grateful for the smoking habits (even if he won't do it around Oz anymore) of his (apparently not-so, as of late,) useless servant.

Once inside, he doesn't bother to shut the door fully, only crosses the room and sinks his hands into the mattress, tests its comfort, finds it suitably so, and hops into bed with his feet dangling over the edge in wait, his nightshirt precariously draped between his spread thighs.

It doesn't take long, and the bedroom door slowly creaks open, cautiously pauses midway on its hinges before it slams open completely against the wall behind it.

Gil freezes in the open doorway. "O-Oz!" There's no way to hide a shock of this magnitude and Gil doesn't try to; Oz watches as he merely reaches behind his back and shuts his bedroom door. "What are you doing here?"

"Just coming to say hello, Gil~!" He tilts his head to the side, a devious little smirk on those lips. "Can't a master see his servant before he goes to sleep?"

"O-of course you can! But, I was just, just about--"

But his stutter is a dead giveaway that something is terribly, terribly wrong in Gil's world, and Oz knows _exactly _what this _terribly wrong _is. "About to _what_, Gil? _Hmm_?"

There is a single knock at the door.

Gil turns as white as the bed sheets.

Oz grins a little wider.

The door opens enough for a body to fit through and Alice slips inside, runs into Gil's back with a curse and a grunt-- "Oz!" Her shriek is almost the same intensity as the one she used the night before in the library; she shoves her way past Gil, who still insists on doing his best impression of a wall, and doesn't back down in the least bit, even in her revealingly white nightshirt. "What are you doing here?"

"I had to see what was going on," and he can't hide the satisfaction in his voice; it fills him like the after effects of a drug, "With you two sneaking around."

The decidedly guilty expression on both of their faces says it all.

"So now that I have you both here, I want you to show me," Oz says and it's with a manipulativeness that goes beyond his years and quirks his lips up at one corner and strengthens his body language as he motions both Alice and Gil towards the bed, "What you've been hiding."


End file.
